Examination of Witnesses (Questions 56
- 59)
MONDAY 18 FEBRUARY 2008
Professor Gill Walt, Dr Richard Coker and Professor
Janet Hemingway
Q56 Chairman:
Good afternoon. Welcome to the Intergovernmental Organisations
Select Committee. You will know, I am sure, that our primary interest
is the effectiveness of British government policy working through
intergovernmental organisations and their organisational strengths
and weaknesses. This session is being held in public. You will
have the opportunity to correct any factual matters in the transcript,
which will be sent to you. It is also being sound recorded. At
any stage after you have finished at this meeting, if you want
to send in additional information to clarify or add to anything
you have said, please feel free to do so. Finally, although we
will put the questions to all three of you, any of you can respond.
I recognise there are two separate schools here and you might
well want to give your evidence separately. Professor Walt, I
understand you are from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical
Medicine; Dr Coker is also from the London School; Professor Hemingway
is from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. One of the
things that I have been interested in, which the Committee has
been picking up and which is referred to in your evidence, is
this issue of global surveillance capacity. The London School
says it has improved in the past decade but also that there is
a weak surveillance capacity and, of particular interest to me,
a lack of integration between animal and human health. I wonder
if you could tell us a little bit more about that, expand on what
those improvements are and also what the weaknesses are.
Dr Coker: I think the SARS crisis forced a re-think
globally on global surveillance and was really, in a sense, a
dry run for pandemic flu. What became clear through that was that
surveillance around the world needed to be better collated, faster
and different sources used, so not only full national surveillance
programmes but also more informal systems of surveillance needed
to be drawn upon. The reason we mentioned in our submission the
lack of capacity and integration between health surveillance systems
was when we were reflecting on pandemic flu preparedness, where
there is a clear link between animal surveillance and human surveillance
systems. If we look, for example, at Africa, where there has been
a considerable amount of investment in the last couple of years
in animal surveillance and poultry surveillance, surveillance
for pandemic flu has not been strengthened to the same degree.
That said, there are initiatives in Africa to try to bring together
these different surveillance systems, but I think as an illustration
of the parallel streams of surveillance that is not a bad example.
I think that is replicated elsewhere in the developed world as
well. If we want to have an early warning system that tells us
about the potential for human pandemic, then we need to have a
good animal surveillance system which is linked to human surveillance
systems.
Q57 Chairman:
Is your main point that the key weakness is between animal and
human health surveillance? Is that right?
Dr Coker: It is the linkage between the two
and the development of the two to different degrees.
Q58 Chairman:
To different degrees in what sense?
Dr Coker: For example, the emphasis at the moment
in Africa in poultry surveillance because of anxieties around
avian flu but there is a lack of capacity development for human
pandemic flu in Africa.
Q59 Chairman:
Where do you think the weakness of that part of the surveillance
could be improved? Which organisation would be most well-placed
to look at improving that surveillance?
Dr Coker: In a sense it falls between two international
agencies, WHO and FAO, and that may be the reason why there has
been this somewhat parallel system developed.
|
